Mickey-Jo is doing his first ever live show! - MickeyJoTheatre

MickeyJoTheatre Episode Summary: "Mickey-Jo's First Live Show Announcement"

Episode Information

Podcast Title: MickeyJoTheatre
Host: MickeyJoTheatre (Micky Jo)
Episode Title: Mickey-Jo is doing his first ever live show!
Release Date: March 7, 2024

Introduction

In this landmark episode, Micky Jo, the dynamic host of MickeyJoTheatre, unveils an exciting new venture: his inaugural live show titled "Mickey Jo Theatre Live". Known for his insightful theatre reviews across platforms like West End, Broadway, and more, Micky Jo takes his passion a step further by bringing his expertise directly to audiences in a live setting.

Micky Jo (00:00): "As one of the leading voices in theatre criticism on a social platform, Mickey-Jo is pioneering a new medium for a dwindling field."

Journey to Becoming a Theatre Critic

Micky Jo shares his evolution from a passionate theatre performer to a renowned critic. He reminisces about his early days creating content purely out of love for theatre, using basic tools and minimal subscribers.

Micky Jo (00:45): "I had a written theater blog that nobody really read because I never really shared it anywhere... purely doing all of this because I enjoyed it."

His transition was not planned but emerged organically as he found greater artistic fulfillment in critiquing and analyzing performances rather than performing himself.

Micky Jo (02:15): "Seeing all of the theater, getting to experience everything and approaching it from an analytical and critical, passionate perspective is so much more interesting to me."

Announcement of Mickey Jo Theatre Live

The core of the episode is the announcement of Micky Jo's first live show. Scheduled for May 26th, 2024, at the Phoenix Arts Club in London, this event marks a significant milestone in his career.

Micky Jo (15:20): "What I am doing is producing my first ever live show, Mickey Jo Theatre Live, which I'm sure invites hundreds of follow up questions."

He emphasizes that the live show is not an attempt to shift into acting but rather an extension of his current role as a critic, inspired by figures like Paul Wonterek and Seth Radetzky.

Micky Jo (04:50): "I have idolized Paul Wonterek from Broadway.com and Seth Radetzky... that's what inspired the concept of what a Mickey Jo Theatre Live show would be."

Ticket Information and Pricing

Micky Jo provides a comprehensive breakdown of the ticket tiers, ensuring transparency and accessibility for his audience.

Premium Tickets (£25): Includes pre-show meet and greet with Micky Jo and his fiancé, Erin James, allowing for photos and personal interactions. Attendees gain early access to the venue.

Micky Jo (10:30): "The first few rows are going to be priced at £25, a sort of a premium section which does include a pre show meet and greet opportunity."
Standard Tickets (£20): General admission without the meet and greet, offering an affordable option to experience the live show.

Micky Jo (12:10): "The standard ticket price for the event that doesn't include the meet and greet option is just £20."
Restricted View Tickets (£15): Seats at the side with limited views, suitable for those on a tighter budget.

Micky Jo (12:45): "There are some sort of seats at the side which is semi restricted view."

He reassures attendees about the value of the pricing, highlighting the professional quality and the two-act cabaret structure featuring multiple musical theatre guest stars.

Micky Jo (13:30): "This is going to be a two act evening with multiple professional musical theatre guest stars... the ticket price needs to live in that realm."

Venue Details: Phoenix Arts Club

Located beneath the historic Phoenix Theater in London, the Phoenix Arts Club serves as the venue for the live show. Micky Jo provides insights into the venue’s unique characteristics and logistical considerations.

Micky Jo (18:00): "The Phoenix Arts Club... is contained beneath street level... Unfortunately, it is not wheelchair accessible."

He acknowledges the venue's challenges regarding accessibility and hints at developing solutions to address these concerns, though details remain forthcoming.

Micky Jo (19:10): "I do have a solution for this... I don't quite have all of my ducks in a row for that one."

Show Content and Unique Features

"Mickey Jo Theatre Live" promises an engaging blend of theatre discussions, Q&A sessions, and live performances with a unique interactive twist.

Interactive Song Selection: Audience votes in real-time on which songs performers will sing, either Micky Jo’s choices or the audience's favorites.

Micky Jo (22:15): "The audience will get to vote in real time on which of two possible songs the performers are going to sing."
Musical Theatre Trivia: Incorporates game show elements to entertain and engage the audience.

Micky Jo (23:00): "We're going to do a little bit of a musical theatre trivia game moment that I'm very excited about."
Spotlight on New Composers: Features segments dedicated to promoting emerging British musical theatre composers, starting with his musical director, Tom Arnold.

Micky Jo (24:30): "There is going to be a section of the show dedicated towards platforming a particular new musical composer... my musical director, Tom Arnold, who is brilliant."

Accessibility and Charity Initiatives

Micky Jo underscores his commitment to accessibility and social responsibility. While addressing the venue's accessibility issues, he also announces that a portion of the event's profits will support a charity close to his heart.

Micky Jo (26:40): "A portion of the profits thereafter is going to be donated to a charity that is very close to my heart."

He expresses his desire to give back, even if the contribution isn't substantial, emphasizing the personal significance of the chosen charity.

Future Plans and Aspirations

Treating the live show as a proof of concept, Micky Jo envisions "Mickey Jo Theatre Live" becoming a recurring event. Future shows may feature discussions on new productions, exclusive announcements, and continuous support for emerging talent in the musical theatre scene.

Micky Jo (28:20): "I treat this live show like a sort of a proof of concept preview type of a thing... my aspiration that this will become a recurring thing in London."

Conclusion and Call to Action

Micky Jo concludes the episode with a heartfelt invitation to his listeners, urging them to attend the live show and engage with the community.

Micky Jo (30:50): "I can't wait to see you all at the end of May at the Phoenix Arts Club. Please get your tickets."

He encourages feedback and participation, highlighting the importance of community support in making the live show a success.

Micky Jo (31:30): "If anyone has any questions, obviously any queries, please let me know in the comments section down below."

Notable Quotes

On Artistic Fulfillment:

"Approaching theatre from an analytical and critical, passionate perspective is so much more interesting to me." (02:15)
On Live Show Inspiration:

"I'm not seeking out an acting career; this is about extending my role as a critic." (05:10)
On Community Engagement:

"It's a very different thing to actually do something in person and think, are people going to show up?" (29:00)

Final Thoughts

This episode serves as a comprehensive announcement and a deep dive into Micky Jo's journey and future aspirations. By launching "Mickey Jo Theatre Live," Micky Jo not only expands his repertoire but also strengthens his connection with the theatre community. His transparent approach to ticketing, dedication to quality, and commitment to social causes position this live show as a noteworthy event for theatre enthusiasts.

Stay Updated:
Subscribe to MickeyJoTheatre YouTube Channel to receive the latest updates, guest announcements, and additional information leading up to the live show on May 26th.

Transcript

Micky Jo (0:00)

So I have a confession to make. As well as all of the reviews and the trips and all of the social media stuff that you have been seeing on my channels here and on TikTok and on Instagram for the last few months, I have been working on a very exciting side project that I have not been able to tell you about, but I am going to today. Oh my God. Hey. Welcome back to my theatre themed YouTube channel. Chances are if you've clicked on this video, which is not about a particular show, which is just an update from me, you probably already know who I am. But if you have stumbled across across this one. My name is Micky Jo and I am principally known as a theater critic here on social media, here on YouTube, which incidentally was never really the plan. Going back like over a decade, I had a written theater blog that nobody really read because I never really shared it anywhere. And a little while after that, I started making YouTube videos backstage at the amateur dramatic productions I was in. If anyone used to watch broadway.com vlogs, then that's definitely what I was emulating. But for Dorset Community Theatre, and at that point point, I was filming them on my phone. Not even this phone, an older phone. I was editing them on my phone and purely doing all of this because I enjoyed it. This was nowhere near a thousand subscribers. This was nowhere near anything resembling the Mickey Jo Theatre of it all that you see now. And some of you have heard me tell the story of what happened subsequently before and how it kind of grew to this. Some of you may even have been along for the ride. Some of you know me personally. But all of this is to illustrate that there was a time I was so in love with theatre that it seemed obvious to me that I wanted to be a performer. That was the most obvious thing. The joy of then sort of falling into the critical side of things, not something I deliberately sought out, but something I sort of just grew into doing here on YouTube is finding out that that brings me so much more artistic fulfillment. Seeing all of the theater, getting to experience everything and getting to approach it from an analytical and critical, passionate perspective is so much more interesting to me than just singing and dancing and acting on only two of which I was ever passably good at, by the way. Now, just over a year ago, I became full time here on YouTube and I've spent the last 12 months really just trying to keep up with the treadmill of it all and hit the ground running and work out what my new day to day looked like and what life was like and what finances were like as a self employed freelancer, kind of breaking into an influencer industry that didn't really functionally exist a year ago. All of which, needless to say, has been made possible by the people who click on and watch these videos, the people who have subscribed, the people who comment and like, and of course the people who are supporting as channel members. All of you amazing people watching these videos just by engaging with the stuff that I share on social media have helped to foster a lot of opportunities just like this one. So I'm delaying, but here it is. Here's my actual news. I'm not pregnant. I didn't secretly get married. That's going to take a lot more planning than that. I'm not moving to New York. That's expensive. I am not part of the brand new UK tour of Mary Poppins. They just happen to be announcing on the same day. Can you imagine? U P E R what I am doing is producing my first ever live show, Mickey Jo Theatre Live, which I'm sure invites hundreds of follow up questions. So let me explain. So this idea was born when I was approached by a specific London venue, the Phoenix Arts Club. They got in touch with me again, having seen like my videos on YouTube, inquiring about the possibility of doing some sort of a show or some sort of an evening and what that might look like, whether it was like a live recording session or a podcast taping. And after having spent the better part of a year just trying to keep up with the stuff I was already doing, I had kind of started to think about the other things that I could explore and the other things that this could become. And I'm painfully aware that as soon as I say this, a lot of people are going to think that this is me trying to transition into some sort of career on the stage as an actor. And please believe me, that is not something that I am seeking out. That is also not what this is. If anything, for the longest time I have idolized Paul Wonterek from Broadway.com and Seth Radetzky who had this amazing long running New York based Broadway chat interview cabaret show called Seth's Broadway Chatterbox. I'm the biggest fan of Seth Radetzky and Paul. It's those kind of footsteps that I am trying to follow in here and that is very much what inspired the concept of what a Mickey Jo Theatre live show would be. Much like. Watching one of my YouTube videos, it will be me chatting, talking about recent theatre news. There will be a Q&A portion. But because I am such a fan of musical theatre and I know that you are as well, I will also be joined by some very exciting rising stars from the musical theatre sphere. Some very exciting performers who I am lucky enough to also call friends whose names I am not going to reveal yet. I am so sorry. It's so incredibly mean of me. I know. That will get revealed in an update video coming out. Nearer the time. I say nearer the time. I haven't told you when this is happening. I'm doing a horrible job at this. Let's start over. Oh my God. Hey. I'm going to be doing a live show on May 26th in London at the Phoenix Arts Club at 7:30 and I really hope that you can join me as of right now. And this video will have dropped at 5pm UK time on Thursday 7th March. The event is currently on sale exclusively to my YouTube channel members by way of a thank you for all of their support up to now. But general sale will begin on Friday 8th March at 9am UK time channel members. If you're wondering how to access the presale, I will have done a channel member exclusive community post with a password to the ticket page. If you haven't been able to find that, please get in touch with me privately or on here and I will do my best to point you in that direction. Speaking of which, let's talk ticket prices. So this is an intimate little cabaret venue. I'll tell you more about the space in a moment, but we have three tiers of ticket prices. The first few rows are going to be priced at £25, a sort of a premium section which does include a pre show meet and greet opportunity. We can take photos, we can chat, you can ask me questions. If that sounds like something that you would like to add on to this experience, then maybe that is the ticket package for you. You'll get let into the venue a little bit ahead of the start of the performance and we'll get to have a cute little meet and greet moment. Also my staging fiance Erin James will be there as well because people get very upset when they meet me and he isn't nearby. The standard ticket price for the event that doesn't include the meet and greet option is just £20 and there are some sort of seats at the side which is semi restricted view. But it's not like I'm doing the Lion King, it's just going to be people sat on the stage and talking and singing things. So those are going to be priced at £15 and I'll be very transparent, transparent here. I'm working directly with the venue. I do not have an external producer at this time. I am making all of these decisions sort of by myself and I questioned whether this was too much because I'm not a West End show and I'm not suggesting that I am of comparable quality to a West End show. At the same time, this is going to be a two act evening with multiple professional musical theatre guest stars who are very exciting names who are going to be giving you world class performances. There will be singing and in order for them to be compensated properly, in order for my musical director to be compensated, compensated properly, who is also a professional genius, in order for everyone involved in the evening to be paid what they are worth. That is the realm in which the ticket price needs to live. It's also, like I said, a two act evening of cabaret and for tickets to be much lower than that. I don't want to begin to devalue the notion of what an evening of cabaret actually is in London. Now if you're wondering about the Phoenix Arts Club, this is a historic institution within the West End. You can find it underneath the Phoenix Theater where Stranger Things, the First Shadow is currently playing. It's on Phoenix street in London. It's not too far from the Dominion Theatre at Soho Place, the Palace Theatre and the venue itself is actually contained beneath street level, a quirk of which is unfortunately that it is not wheelchair accessible. Something that the venue and believe me have really striven to try and improve. But if you've ever been there before, if you have any knowledge of this venue, you will understand the logistical issues that they face, namely gravity. Now accessibility is something which is really important to them and to me and I do have a solution for this. It is not a perfect solution and unfortunately I also not able to tell you what it is just yet, which again is super annoying of me, but I don't quite have all of my ducks in a row for that one. So news on that is going to come with the next update announcement about the evening. I feel like I'm making this sound like a conference at this point. I'm excited, I'm really excited and simultaneously terrified about this. I am going to be singing a little bit. You can blame Peter Dunbar from the Phoenix Arts Club for saying that that's pretty important to the show and I also wanted this to stand out alongside other sort of West End chat show formats. I don't think I'm the the first person to ever do this kind of a thing, to ever chat to guests from the musical theatre world. So there's a couple little things I'm going to be doing differently. First of all, if you've seen any of my interviews before, you know that I have a pretty unique approach to asking interview questions. There is going to be plenty of that. We're going to be asking the questions people really want to know, but also keeping it fun and light hearted and hopefully funny. And of course there will be multiple musical performances, but with a twist, because I've been to these kind of cabaret shows before and when a performer sings something, I as an audience member almost always have an opinion about the song that they've chosen and have a preconception about what I want them to sing. So instead, at almost every opportunity for a song in the show, and there are several, the audience will get to vote in real time on which of two possible songs the performers are going to sing. They can either sing the one that they want to or the one that I want them to. We will present both options and then you, the audience will get to choose some other stuff that there's going to be in the I have always wanted to be a game show host, so we're going to do a little bit of a musical theatre trivia game moment that I'm very excited about and I hope you are as well. Also, if you know anything about me, you know that it is a passion of mine to support British musical theatre composers. So there is going to be a section of the show dedicated towards platforming a particular new musical composer. And for this show that is going to be my musical director, whose name is Tom Arnold, who is brilliant. I'm very excited for you to get to hear his music. He's fantastic. We might do a little bit of a preview, maybe when I do an update video. If we've had some rehearsal time before then. I'm trying to think of everything else I need to tell you about this evening. The poster that you will currently see is very much just preliminary. I waxed that out on Canva the other day. I am working with a professional, excellent graphic designer who's going to be putting together a proper poster. Don't worry, I am paying the people to do the proper things. We are doing this properly. That is going to be forthcoming along alongside the announcement of the guests. And hopefully I'm hoping that with this live show I'm also going to be able to debut a new range of merchandise, which is something I've always talked about. And planned for, but literally have never been able to successfully implement before because it's always been too much work and I've always wanted to do it again professionally and properly and get stuff that doesn't just like say, oh my God, hey on it in a basic font. I want this to actually be cute. I want this to actually look good. I have strong feelings about merchandise. As you know, it is not enough to just slap a logo onto something. I want this to actually be decent and of durable, professional quality. So we're working on that. Hopefully there will be merchandise available at the live show and that will launch the availability of merchandise online. In a perfect world, we'll see what happens there. Capitalism is tricky. Finally, I think this is. Finally, I may have other updates. I am going to be supporting a charity as a result of this and without telling you my entire financial breakdown. I'm not making a lot of profit from this. Like the venue is being super generous with me and I'm trying to pay everyone involved, like not just the basic industry standard, but like what their time is honestly worth. But a portion of the profits thereafter is going to be donated to a charity that is very close to my heart, which I'm not going to mention now. I will be talking about it near the time if they want me to. I will obviously be talking about it on the night and why it's important to me. It's not like one of the really big, well known ones. This is a very small, quite new charity that I have a very meaningful personal connection to. And even if it's not a huge amount of money, I have wanted to be able to work with this charity and help support them for the longest time. And as part of all this, I'm really, really, really happy that I get the chance to do that. And as an addendum to that, I should say I'm treating this live show like a sort of a proof of concept preview type of a thing. This is very new territory for me and I don't want to be presumptuous enough to say I'm now going to be doing a bunch of live shows. It is however, my aspiration that this will become a recurring thing in London, that it would be regular. Wouldn't it be great to talk about like the new shows of the month at live show, the theatre news of the past few weeks, get new guests from productions that are about to open, that have recently opened, who are in rehearsals, maybe even like some exclusive announcements at the live show, fun things like that. And also that's something that the venue is hoping for as well. So all being well, this is hopefully going to become ongoing for the future, but at this time I just have have one show. It's on May 26th. You can get tickets right now. If you are a channel member, you can get tickets on Friday 8th March at 9am UK time. If not, if you don't know how to become a channel member. By the way, the link is in the description of this video. The link for tickets is also in the description of this video. If you're watching it after Friday 8th of March 9am UK time. I don't think there's anything else that I need to tell you about this. If anyone has any questions, obviously any queries, please let me know in the comments section down below. I'm trying to think of everything and trying to make sure that I am producing this in a way that's accessible and conscientious. The actual content of the show is now pretty structurally planned in my head, but if you have any brilliant ideas about the kind of thing that you would like to see at a Mickey Jo Live show, feel free to put that in the comment section as well. And if anyone is planning on coming, if anyone gets tickets, then please post it in the comments here or post about it on social media. Send me a message just to let me know that people are actually interested and people are actually coming. Because it's one thing to put a video up online and to have people watch it. It's a very different thing to actually do something in person and think are people going to show up? We didn't know when we first tweeted about doing a meetup in New York if anyone would come and then we were so amazed by the response to that. So I'm hoping that a Mickey Jo Theatre live show in London is something that people might be interested in and might be excited by. I can't wait. I am so excited. Thank you so much for putting up with me teasing this announcement. Normal service will resume here on my channel. I have Broadway and West End reviews and UK tour reviews coming soon. I have vlogs from show launches coming soon, hopefully more interviews and between now and May 26th you will see a little update video here about how things are progressing for the live show. Hopefully I'll be launching some new artwork. I'll be letting you know who the guests are. They were both my first choice guests by the way, and they both said yes, enthusiastically, enthusiastically. Which was really exciting. I can't wait to tell you. I can't wait to see you all at the end of May at the Phoenix Arts Club. Please get your tickets and I think that's everything I have to say. Thank you for watching this video. Make sure you're subscribed so you don't miss any updates. Let me know if you have any questions about tickets. Anything else, put it in the comments. I will do my best to answer. In the meantime, I hope that everyone is staying safe and that you have a Stagey Day. For 10 more seconds. I'm Mickey Jo Theatre. Oh, thanks for watching. Have a stagey day. Subscribe.